


Modori Ame: A Kiiroi Namida Interlude

by darkdropout



Category: Arashi (Band), Kiiroi Namida (Film)
Genre: Kiiroi Namida AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-05
Updated: 2011-07-05
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:29:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkdropout/pseuds/darkdropout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loosely follows the plot of the film Kiiroi Namida starring Arashi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Modori Ame: A Kiiroi Namida Interlude

**Author's Note:**

> I imagine this is hard to follow if you have not see the film. Much thanks to astrangerenters for being an awesome, lightning-fast beta! Kiiroi Namida is, for whatever reason, one of my very favorite movies and I am constantly vexed as to why it's not everyone's. Hopefully, this shares even a little bit of my love for this film with you! :) Also, I wrote this only to discover later that the lyrics to "Modori Ame" (one of the songs from the film) fiit the story perfectly. Clearly, it was MTB!!
> 
>  
> 
> For reader reference:  
> Muraoka Eisuke, the manga artist – Nino  
> Shimokawa Kei, the painter – Ohno  
> Inoue Shoichi, the singer – Aiba  
> Mukai Ryuzo, the novelist – Sho  
> Katsumada Yuji, the other guy – Jun (not featured, but mentioned!)
> 
>  
> 
> “I want you to understand these feelings   
> If only your feelings would change to thoughts of me too  
>   My heart is about to burst  
>  Because it's filled with thoughts of you  
>   I don't have anything and I can't do anything  
> But my feelings for you won't lose to anyone    
> My heart is about to burst   
> Because it's filled with thoughts of you   
> My heart is about to burst   
> Because it's filled with thoughts of you  
> Because I love you.”
> 
> -Modori Ame, Arashi  
> Lyric translation here by the lovely taijiproject

Eisuke meets Kei at _Sakaeya_ , and it seems a bit fateful from the start. Eisuke notices him the moment he walks in – a small, thin man in a hat with a bad slouch. His clothes are dirty and covered in smears of brightly colored paint. His face is small and round, a little tan from the sun, and he has nervous eyes that move back and forth even as Tokie directs him to a seat near the back.

“Ah,” the man says. He puts out a hand to stop her. “Can I – can I sit near the front?”

Tokie looks at him quizzically. He takes off his hat and clenches it in his hands, moving his fingers around and around the brim. “Please,” he says, staring at the floor. 

Tokie just nods, still watching him appraisingly as he drops into a seat by the door with a relieved sigh.

Eisuke tries not to watch him, but he can’t help it. It’s a small restaurant with a regular crowd, and it’s been a while since Eisuke’s seen anyone of interest walk through the door.

The man orders hesitantly – the cheapest dish on the menu – still not looking Tokie directly in the eye. When she places his food in front of him a few minutes later, he looks a little dazed, staring down at the bowl with dreamy eyes like it’s only a mirage. He picks up his chopsticks delicately, placing them between his open palms, and bows his head in thanks before devouring the entire thing in huge, frantic bites. 

Eisuke turns back to his own meal then, smiling to himself with the quiet empathy of someone who knows what it’s like to be that hungry. He’s caught up in a memory (a particularly desperate week last winter when he was forced to beg his elderly landlady for a bowl of rice) when he’s startled back to the present.

There’s a scrambling noise, the sound of breaking dishes and a barking shout from the owner. Eisuke looks up to see the same man, in his paint-splattered clothes, being dragged back through the door by the bright orange collar of his shirt.

“You think you can run out without paying?” the owner is yelling, right in his face, his grip tight on the man’s neck. The man’s eyes are wild and bright, a caught animal. He’s squirming like he’s trying to break free, but the owner is twice his size and there’s really no hope for it. 

Eisuke feels bad for him, and he’s not sure why. But there’s something so pathetic about this small, hungry man. The owner is still yelling at him, and he looks as if he’s about to cry. 

Eisuke stands up. He picks up the man’s hat, which must have fallen in the mad dash to the door. He dusts it off and puts it on the counter then glances over his shoulder at the man – who’s watching him, his eyes filled with confusion, even as the owner continues to bellow.

“I’d like to pay now,” he says to Tokie where she’s standing behind the counter looking a little lost. Eisuke nods towards the man. “For me and for him.”

Later, when they’ve made it out the door and into the street, Eisuke almost regrets his random act of kindness

“Thank you, thank you,” the man keeps saying, bowing over and over, a little lower each time.

“Please, stop,” Eisuke answers, because it really isn’t a big deal, only a few yen (who orders the cheapest meal on the menu when they’re not planning to pay for it in the first place?) and this is getting embarrassing.

Then he’s struck with a thought. “But can I ask you a favor?”   
  


  
  
The man’s name is Shimokawa Kei. He’s a painter and, like most artists Eisuke has come across in his time in Tokyo, he’s perpetually low on cash. He tells Eisuke this and a whole stream of other things as they walk towards _The Ship_ cafe to meet Mukai. 

Shimokawa accepts Eisuke’s proposition eagerly, as odd as it is – _pretend to be a doctor so my mother will come to Tokyo for an operation that could save her life_. Most people would take some time to think about it at least. Mukai had turned him down twice before he finally came back, grinning sheepishly and asking if he could play the head doctor as it would be the best experience for his novel. Shoichi’s hesitant to agree too, but in the end they’ve been friends for too long already so he can’t really say no to Eisuke, and he certainly can’t say no to anyone’s dying mother.

Shimokawa doesn’t ask a single question even though Eisuke can think of half a dozen that should come to mind pretty immediately. But the man seems happy with a chance to repay his savior and happier still to be offered money for his trouble so he doesn’t say a word besides, “Okay.”

 

 

With a third conspirator, Eisuke decides it’s time to start planning. It takes a few weeks – finding a good hospital, procuring the doctor’s uniforms, and most importantly, convincing his mother to get on the train to Tokyo because a doctor is meeting her personally to escort her to her surgery.

 

  
During that preparation time, Shimokawa follows him around.

“Shouldn’t you be painting?” Eisuke asks him as he fishes out a pack of cigarettes from his coat. It’s the third day since they met back at the restaurant and the third day that Eisuke’s left his apartment to find Shimokawa loitering across the street, waiting for him. 

Shimokawa shrugs. “I’m out of paint. Nothing to do until you pay me.”

He smiles wide, rocking back on his feet, his hands jammed in the pockets of his paint-splattered pants. Eisuke wants to ask him why he bothers to wear white pants when his hobby is by nature quite messy, but he has a feeling that Shimokawa’s financial situation doesn’t allow him to be too picky in his clothing choices. 

Instead he laughs sympathetically, tapping a cigarette out of the pack in his hands. He doesn’t miss the way that Shimokawa’s gaze follows it as he lifts it to his lips.

Eisuke lights it, takes a drag, then offers it. Shimokawa looks a little self-conscious, but doesn’t hesitate to reach for it.

“Where have you been sleeping?”

Eisuke knows that Shimokawa must not have a place to go home to because first of all, he has no money, and second, he appears to be carrying everything he owns with him, all the time. The latter he might just overlook as a habit if it wasn’t so clearly inconvenient for Shimokawa to be lugging around a heavy backpack full of sketchbooks and canvases.

Besides that, if he had somewhere else to go, he probably wouldn’t be outside Eisuke’s apartment every morning.

Shimokawa doesn’t answer the question right away, too busy puffing happily at Eisuke’s cigarette, taking a few more lungfuls of smoke than is strictly polite. Eisuke doesn’t really mind.

“In the park,” he says finally. “It’s nice weather so it hasn’t been so bad.” 

It has been nice weather in that it hasn’t rained in days, but it’s only a few months into spring and already it’s as hot as summer and only getting hotter. The park is fine, safe even, but there’s something about picturing Shimokawa curled up under the already budding sakura trees that Eisuke doesn't like. 

Shimokawa makes to hand the cigarette back to him, but Eisuke refuses it, putting his hand out.“Stay at my place,” he says instead.

Shimokawa smiles again and Eisuke, despite the heat wave, feels hotter than he’s felt all year.

 

 

Eisuke’s second offer is accepted just as enthusiastically as the first one. Eisuke’s apartment is small, but not impossibly so and Shimokawa looks so impressed by it when he bows his way into the room that Eisuke suddenly feels very lucky to have it at all.

He shows Shimokawa his manga and even lets him see his newest piece, still a work in progress. Shimokawa studies it carefully, lingering so long on each page that Eisuke starts to wonder if he can actually read. But at the end, Shimokawa looks up, his smile bright, and says, “You draw such pretty lines, Muraoka-san.” 

It’s an odd compliment and one he’s never gotten before, but for some reason Eisuke is pleased by it. He hands Shimokawa a fresh cigarette. 

Shimokawa shows Eisuke his paintings. He’s been carrying them on his back this whole time, but Eisuke has no idea how good they are until they’re laid out in front of him. 

“You painted this?” he asks, fingers ghosting over thick strokes of oil paint.

Shimokawa nods, his smile bashful. “Yeah,” he answers.

 

 

They stay up most of the night talking about art, about money and everything in between, stripping off layers of clothing in the heat of the small room even as the temperature drops outside.

It turns out there’s a reason Shimokawa agreed to help Eisuke so easily. His own mother had died when he was sixteen.He’d been very close with her growing up, and she was the one who had always encouraged his talent for drawing. The night she passed away, he’d had a fight with his father after announcing he was dropping out of school to pursue his painting. It ended with Shimokawa storming out of the house and spending the night sleeping in the train station. When he got back home the next morning, his mother was already gone.

After that, Shimokawa had left home for good, wandering around the country with his paintbrushes and struggling to live up to his mother’s hopes for him. 

It’s been a long time since Eisuke has had someone to talk to like this, and it makes him realize, rather suddenly, that he’s been lonely all this time. Friends come and go in Tokyo and besides the occasional night out drinking with Shoichi, Eisuke doesn’t see much of anyone these days, since he's so focused on his work and making enough to pay his rent.

Shimokawa isn’t smart, but he’s funny and passionate, and they understand things about each other without having to explain much at all. When it comes down to it, they have the same dreams – dreams of living off their art and making it into a career.

The apartment being how it is, they end up sleeping right next to each other. It’s too hot for blankets, too hot for futons even, so they just sort of curl up where they are and go to sleep.

Sometime in the night, Eisuke wakes up, sweating and hard.

It takes him a moment to get his bearings and when he does, he realizes Shimokawa is pressed against him, hard too and rocking against his thigh. 

Instinctually, Eisuke’s hands fly to Shimokawa’s shoulders, and he flips them over. He feels Shimokawa’s back connect with the worn tatami beneath them, a quiet thud. 

Their eyes meet, just glints of light in the dark. Then Eisuke shifts closer. Shimokawa’s hand settles low on his back, and Eisuke arches forward, their bodies meeting.

Even in the dark, they both see stars. 

They start to move, the air thick with their heat and the sound of their breathing. As he comes hard between them, Eisuke searches out Shimokawa’s lips, kissing him more tenderly than he means to. Shimokawa whimpers into his mouth and thrusts up, desperately, before following him over the edge.

  
The next morning they wake up, half-naked and tangled together. Shimokawa looks ready to apologize when Eisuke finally meets his eyes, but then they both start laughing and the uncertainty melts away in the early morning heat.

 

 

It continues like this for the next few weeks until everything is ready.

During the day, Eisuke and Shimokawa wander around the neighborhood together, stopping by _The Ship_ to see Mukai or hanging around the street corner where Shoichi plays his guitar until Yuji-kun shows up to monopolize his time. If it’s hot, they stay in the apartment and Shimokawa sketches while Eisuke works on his manga.

Even though Shimokawa’s is taking up his space, taking up his life with all his canvases, it’s quite comfortable and kind of nice having someone around. Eisuke’s work, which had been coming slow at best, seems to be spurred on by the scrape of paintbrushes and Kei’s quiet humming. 

But no matter how they while away the days, the nights are all the same. In the dark Shimokawa is there, pressing burning kisses into Eisuke’s neck as Eisuke fumbles to get him out of his shorts. 

They don’t talk about it because they don’t need to. Eisuke is content to continue the way things are, knowing they will eventually come to an end, but feeling happier than he has in years.

And if he sometimes catches Shimokawa staring at him when he thinks he isn’t looking, eyes dark with an unreadable expression, Eisuke pretends not to notice.

 

 

The whole escapade goes as planned and before they know it, Eisuke’s mother is settled at Nitto University Hospital awaiting her surgery. In celebration, Eisuke treats them all – Shoichi and Mukai and Shimokawa – to katsudon at _Sakaeya_. 

“I’m glad you found work,” Tokie says quietly to Shimokawa as she sets down the bowl in front of him. He bows his head with that same embarrassed smile Eisuke’s been living with these past few weeks, then turns to share it with Eisuke who smiles back despite himself. 

They part ways at the end of the meal. The goodbyes are warm, everyone still high from their success, Eisuke most of all. He shakes hands with each of them in turn, and if his fingers linger against Shimokawa’s palm a little longer than with the others, their farewell words don’t show it.

“Once we make it, we’ll see each other in Ginza,” Mukai announces happily, his thick Kyoto accent giving his words a poetry in their own way. 

Eisuke watches them leave. Shimokawa only gets a few steps away before he stops and turns to wave. He smiles, but there’s that unreadable expression again, peeking out from beneath the wide brim of his hat. 

Eisuke waves back. 

It was fun while it lasted, he thinks, and heads back to his now empty apartment. 

 

 

Eisuke doesn’t expect to see any of them again. Which is why he’s so surprised when two months later, there’s a knock at the door.

“It’s open,” he calls, picking through the ashtray for anything worth lighting again. It’s been quiet since the others left, but not unbearably so, and although progress on his manga is coming slower now, it’s easy to chalk it up to writer’s block and not the solitary lifestyle he’s returned to. 

When the door swings open, he looks up. Shimokawa is standing in the doorway. He’s dripping wet, barefoot, covered in paint, wearing the same clothes he left in two months ago. He also appears to be carrying the entirety of his life’s possessions on his back, just like he used to.

“I made it,” he murmurs, dropping to the floor. “I finally made it.” 

“What’s up? Lugging all that stuff around…” Eisuke laughs nervously, trailing off as Shimokawa smiles that smile that Eisuke’s been dreaming about for two months. Eisuke feels his heart tighten in his chest. 

“Muraoka-san!” 

There’s a call from below. Eisuke wrenches his eyes away from Shimokawa and scrambles to the window. “Yes?” 

His landlady is staring up at him. “Phone call, from the police,” she tells him, apathetic. 

Eisuke glances behind him, back at Shimokawa, who’s standing right beside him now, close, looking at him with large, wet eyes.

“Hold on,” he says, and runs down for the phone. 

 

 

By the end of the night, they’ve all been reunited. After they’ve bailed Mukai out of jail for selling dirty pictures (“I tried to hold out,” he tells them mournfully, “There’s a limit to how much experience a novelist needs.”), they return later that night to find Shoichi waiting at the bottom of the stairs to Eisuke’s apartment.

They celebrate with as much sake as Shoichi’s two months of savings will buy and soon they’re all stripped down to their underwear, singing loudly and off-key until the neighbors complain. 

  


It’s stiflingly hot, even hotter than it was all those months ago when they first started this. The room smells like sake and sweat and Shoichi and Mukai are sleeping inches away from them, but somehow it doesn’t matter. 

“I missed you,” Eisuke whispers, hand moving slick between them. “Kei.” 

It’s the first time he calls him by his given name and Shimokawa – Kei – makes a desperate sound, sort of high and in the back of his throat.

“Eisuke,” he whimpers, his lips against Eisuke’s throat so that he can feel him say it too. 

Eisuke had forgotten this, but not completely, and it had all come rushing back when Kei showed up on his doorstep this morning. Now he’s high with it – the heady feeling of Kei’s skin against his. It’s what he’s been missing, unconsciously, all this time.

Suddenly, Kei grabs Eisuke’s arm, stopping his hand.

“I love you,” Kei says.

The words tumble out, and Eisuke hears them but he pretends that he doesn’t. They’ve both had a lot to drink.

Instead he presses closer, so close that he can taste Kei’s sweat and so he does, pressing his mouth to Kei’s jaw. 

But Kei’s hand is tight on his arm, the other reaching for his face. His eyes are too serious, too steady, and Eisuke wonders how drunk he really is now, in this moment. 

“I –” Kei starts again. 

Eisuke smashes their lips together before he can say anything else. 

 

 

The next morning, Eisuke goes to the office to ask for another job.He needs to get out of the apartment. Yesterday morning Shimokawa had appeared on his doorstep, with no explanation and ended the night confessing his love.

He wants to blame the alcohol, but even in the dark Kei’s eyes were too clear to be intoxicated.

Eisuke doesn’t know what to think, but he does know, when he wakes up to a tiny apartment filled with three new roommates, that he needs money.

And it wouldn’t hurt to get away from them all for a few hours so he has some time to think. 

“I just got – a roommate,” Eisuke tells the boss, eyes downcast, an explanation for his sudden change of heart. Hadn’t he been there a few days ago, turning down paying work left and right? 

“A girl?” the boss asks, sticking out his pinky suggestively.

The question startles Eisuke, and he pictures Kei’s face, sweaty and so close in the dark.

“No, no, no!” he replies quickly.

The boss looks at him disbelievingly, but doesn’t ask anything else. 

Eisuke takes a job at Samejima’s workshop and doesn’t come back for seventeen days. 

 

 

He returns, finally, more tired than he can ever remember being because he’s not seventeen anymore and staying awake for days straight takes its toll.

He finds the others in high spirits. Shimokawa’s sold a painting while he was gone and gotten enough money for it to buy back everything they’d pawned, including Eisuke’s fan and Mukai and Shoichi’s pants. 

Eisuke feels a bit put out. He just spent the past two weeks locked up in a tiny workshop, risking life and sanity to earn money for all of them. The fact that it had also a convenient way to avoid Kei is beside the point.

Unfortunately, his choice for his escape hadn’t been the best place for soul-searching and self-discovery and he’d been left about where he’d started – confused about everything.

If Kei had meant what he said – and Eisuke couldn’t shake the very real feeling that he had – then Eisuke’s own feelings were in need of definition. He didn’t think he was in love, but in the delirium of sleep deprivation he’d started to think that maybe there were worse things in the world than falling in love with Kei and his bashful smile and his paint-splattered pants.

He thinks maybe – thinks it a lot when he’s at Samejima’s, an ice pack slammed mercilessly against his head to jolt him awake every five minutes – that if he could just kiss Kei again he’d find the answer. 

He plans to do just that as soon as he gets back, but Kei seems to have had a change of heart. He smiles with the others and welcomes Eisuke back, but Eisuke can tell his mind is elsewhere.

Then he sees the sketches littering Kei’s corner of the room – sketches of a girl. 

If it only took Kei a few weeks to fall in love with him, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that it only took him two weeks to fall in love with someone else.

That night, for the first time since their first night together, Kei doesn’t crawl into Eisuke’s futon.  
  


  
  
Shoichi fills Eisuke in on what he’s missed, including Kei’s new love.

“He only saw her once, in the park,” Shoichi says between licks of his ice cream. Eisuke hadn’t bought it to bribe him with exactly, but Shoichi had been a bit quiet lately, things as they are with Tokie, and there was nothing like food to get him talking again.

“So he’s not seeing her?” Eisuke asks, his tone a strained neutral. 

“No.”

Shoichi stops, ice cream halfway to his mouth. There’s a long sticky trail of it melting down his arm, all the way to his elbow.

“I think Kei falls in love kind of easily,” he muses. 

He swipes at the melted drips with two fingers then pops them into his mouth before he continues. 

“Mm, maybe love’s not the word. More like, infatuated. He finds something and then he can’t let it go.” 

“His paintings are like that too, aren’t they? When you think about it? He sits in front of a tree for weeks, painting it and thinking of nothing else. Then when he’s finished, he just walks away and never looks back. Doesn’t even look at the painting again from what I can tell – that’s why Ryuzo and I thought it would be okay to sell the one he had. He wasn’t even looking at it anymore!” 

Shoichi pauses, frowning. Something like guilt passes across his features before he shakes it away. 

“Hey,” says Shoichi. He points to Eisuke’s ice cream, half melted to his hand. “You don’t want the rest of that?” 

 

 

So Kei’s love is fleeting, fleeting like the inspiration for Mukai’s novel or the muses for Shoichi’s songs. Fleeting like true happiness on this earth, Eisuke thinks when he’s feeling a little existential (he’s been hanging out with Mukai too much).

Kei said he loved him and now he loves someone else.That’s okay, Eisuke tells himself, because he doesn’t love him back anyway. Besides, he’s lost love before.

A little more won’t hurt.  
  


  
  
It does hurt, at the Star Festival, when Kaoru pushes him away.

He’d pressed her up against the wall, kissing her with more passion than he ever had when they were young. He kisses her there in the alley, but he thinks of Kei, underneath him in the dark. 

He wonders if she knows it, and if that’s why she leaves. It hurts, but he can’t bring himself to feel guilty, anyway. 

After she disappears around the corner, he wanders the streets, smoking cigarette after cigarette.

He thinks of the perfect ending for his manga.  
  


When he gets home, hours later, the others are already passed out on the floor. Eisuke stumbles around them, ungraceful, and finds himself standing over Kei.

Kei is curled in the corner, face turned towards his painting – the one of the girl in white – that’s propped against the wall. Eisuke wants to lie down next to him and pull him close, curl fingers into his skin. 

But he doesn’t. He’s been rejected too many times tonight already.

Instead he makes himself a space between Mukai and Shoichi, and falls into a restless sleep.

 

 

They fuck in _The Ship_ ’s bathroom while Mukai is asleep in a booth out in the cafe.

Neither of them know how they end up there, Eisuke bent over the dingy sink and the single dim lamp swinging from the ceiling, back and forth, in time to Kei’s thrusts.

Kei presses kisses to his shoulders, drags teeth down the knobs of his spine.

Eisuke just stares at the faucet, watches the drip, drip, drip of water down the drain through eyes half-lidded with pleasure. 

They’re both quiet besides the rough sound of sliding skin and their panting breath.

Eisuke pretends he isn’t waiting for Kei to say it first.

 

“Sex is boring,” Shoichi says to them the morning after his night in Eisuke’s apartment with Tokie, after the other three’s night in _The Ship_. “It’s a letdown, afterwards.” 

Eisuke is quiet while Kei is busying himself with the breakfast dishes. _Yeah,_ Eisuke thinks. _A letdown._

As usual, they don’t talk about it. 

 

 

It happens a few days later. 

“I’m getting married,” Kei says as soon as he enters the room.

Eisuke is refilling the ink in his pen and he turns slowly, eyes impossibly wide as the words sink in. 

“To that woman who came to see you?” asks Shoichi from the windowsill, where he’s been perched with his guitar, conspicuously not playing it.

That morning a mysterious woman had shown up at their door. She was holding Kei’s painting of the girl in white. He’d left it in the park the day before, his name and address in bold letters across the back so, Shoichi proposed, that the girl of his dreams might find it and find him.

This woman, standing at their door in full kimono, eyes the only things wilder than her hair, was not the same girl. But she’d asked for Kei and dragged him out, despite his wide-eyed confusion.

When he comes back hours later, he is engaged. 

“Actually, we were talking at _The Ship_ this whole time,” Kei explains, his voice breathy and a little wondering. “And I realized that I need her. I figure I’ll go for it.”

Eisuke stares at his pen, lets the ink drip through it, and doesn’t see the way Kei’s smile cracks around the edges, how it doesn’t reach his eyes. 

“Right,” Eisuke says. “Time for you to fly off. “ 

Kei lets out a nervous little laugh.

He keeps talking, about the woman and her country house in Karuizawa as the other two _ooh_ and _ahh_ at the prospect of a rich, exotic patroness. After all, for young starving artists, it’s the dream. 

Eisuke stops listening. He can’t hear anything anyway, over the sound of all the blood in his body rushing to his head.

He finishes filling his pen, presses it to the paper, but can’t seem to make it move like it’s supposed to, into those pretty lines that Kei liked so much. The fresh ink bleeds out, an expanding black blotch staining the white beneath it, and he watches with a growing feeling of emptiness.

But then the door opens and _The Ship’_ s proprietor is standing there awkwardly. His eyes fill with sympathy as he questions Kei about the woman he’s spent the afternoon with and tells him what he doesn’t know about her, about who she is. 

“After her fiancé died, she’s never been the same,” he tells them and Kei’s face is getting paler and paler as he speaks. “She greets dejected young men at the train station at sunset, and offers to marry them.”

When he finishes, leaving with small, apologetic nod, everyone is quiet. Kei’s face is still, expression blank, and Eisuke sees his fingers shaking against his folded legs.

Mukai is the first to speak, clearing his throat too loudly in the silent room.

“Bath?” he says, turning toward Shoichi and Eisuke.

 

 

When they get back a few hours later, Kei’s paintbrushes are broken, pieces scattered around the floor. His sketchbooks are ripped open, papers crumpled and torn. Kei is nowhere to be found. 

They clean up his things, carefully. Shoichi straightens his drawings, smoothing them out gently and pressing them between the hard binding of his sketchbooks, while Mukai gathers the larger pieces of Kei’s brushes and lines them carefully along the edge of Eisuke’s desk.

Eisuke runs downstairs to his landlady, asks for tape and glue, bowing so low she scolds him for it and hands over his requests begrudgingly.

They fix the brushes, but they don’t see Kei for the next few days. 

 

 

He does come back, eventually. He says nothing, but nods at Shoichi in thanks when he hands him back his sketchbooks, still wrinkled but not ruined.

Then he sulks and pines and frowns so hard and for such long periods of time that Mukai finally snaps at him.

Eisuke can’t stand to be in the same room with him a second longer and decides it’s as good a time as any to take his finished manga to the office. 

It’s rejected, immediately, the last page barely out of the boss’s hand before he’s shaking his head and saying that children’s manga just doesn’t sell.

When Eisuke decides to stop by the _Olympiad_ – the bar where Tokie works now since she left _Sakaeya_ – he drinks more than he has in months and can only half blame his rejected manuscript for the feelings he’s trying to drown in over-priced sake. 

By the end of the night he’s decided. Tomorrow he’ll make them all move out – Mukai, Shoichi, Kei. Eisuke pictures Kei’s pitiful face and feels the alcohol, heavy and sour in his stomach. 

Tomorrow they have to be gone.

 

 

Eisuke’s still drunk. The shock of finding the other three waiting for him at the station as he stumbled through the gate, the fear that filled him when Mukai handed him the telegram, the one he’d been dreading to receive for months now, the vague understanding that there is a real finality in his friends’ goodbyes – all that sobers him up, a bit, but not enough. 

Which is making it decidedly hard to light his cigarette. 

He’s so intent to get a match lit, scraping its dark tip against the ground over and over as he’s crouched down on the platform, that he doesn’t notice Kei until his dirty, white, paint-splattered shoes stop right in front of him.

Eisuke looks up, cigarette still dangling from his lips. Kei’s hat is in his hands, fingers moving around and around the brim. 

“I can’t get it to light,” Eisuke says to him for no reason at all except he doesn’t know what else to say. 

Kei drops the hat and it lands, a quiet thud, beside them. He reaches down, pulling Eisuke to his feet and pressing their lips together despite the cigarette, which falls to the ground, unnoticed.

“I said I love you,” Kei murmurs as Eisuke breaths him in, once again finding himself kissing this face, this stupid tan face, more tenderly than he means to. 

“To a lot of people, it seems,” he whispers into Kei’s skin.

Kei frowns and Eisuke presses his lips against Kei’s downturned mouth, against the furrow of his brow. 

“I only said it to you,” Kei says, voice quiet and honest. His fingers curl into Eisuke’s shirt. “And you left the next morning and didn’t come back. For two weeks.” 

“Seventeen days,” Eisuke corrects then stops, lips brushing against Kei’s ear. He pulls back a little so he can see Kei’s face.

“Oh,” he says, the pieces falling into place. “You thought–” 

Kei sighs, nods only slightly but as if it’s obvious. He finds Eisuke’s hands and intertwines their fingers.

“The painting–“ Eisuke starts. “The engagement– and Shoichi-kun said–“ 

He stumbles over words, can’t get them out – he’s still drunk after all. 

“You’re not very good at saying things, are you?” Kei says, but there’s a smile in his voice and a hitch in his breath. 

Eisuke just laughs and kisses him, long and hard, until the train pulls into the station.


End file.
